Gurdwara Sahib Yuba City (Sikh Temple Gurdwara)

The Sikh Temple Gurdwara at 2468 Tierra Buena Road, Yuba City, in California's Sutter County, is the Sikh house of worship that hosts Yuba City's annual Nagar Kirtan. The University of California, Davis project on the Punjabi diaspora dates the first Sikh house of worship in Yuba City to 1969, the year of the 500th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak, when the groundbreaking took place.

How it began: a group of well-off Sikhs formed a Gurdwara Committee in the late 1960s, hired an architect, secured land and obtained a loan from United California Bank. The gurdwara stands on three acres of almond orchard donated by the brothers Bakhtawar and Udham Singh Purewal. The founders included long-time US residents and Sikhs initiated into the Khalsa. Before it opened, Sikhs in Yuba City drove nearly 100 miles on country roads to the Stockton gurdwara.

The Nagar Kirtan: the gurdwara holds a three-day festival on the first weekend of November, with the Nagar Kirtan parade on the first Sunday. It starts and ends at the gurdwara and runs through Yuba City's streets, with Sutter County residents escorting it. It centres on Guru Nanak Jayanti. Sources differ on its start: NPR says it has run every year since 1979, and the Davis project dates it to 1980. Free vegetarian food is served at many stalls. A temple cook told NPR about 50,000 people ate at the temple each day in 2022.

Crowd size: attendance is an estimate, not a count. Temple representatives told NPR 160,000 to 250,000 people came in 2022, about double the year before. The 2023 Appeal-Democrat report gave no headcount and said only that the event gets bigger each year. NSPR's report was headlined as the largest Nagar Kirtan held in Yuba City.

Key dates

• 1969: groundbreaking and the first Sikh house of worship in Yuba City.
• 1979 or 1980: the first Nagar Kirtan.
• First weekend of November, every year: the festival and parade.